Is DOSBox Staging better than real Retro PC? Part 1 Graphics 

Yo, DOSBox Staging dev here. That was a very nice and informative video, Phil, congrats! 🎉 As the author of many of the recent audio related improvements in Staging, I'm really looking forward to the next installment! I agree with you, the usability needs to be improved. You might be delighted to hear that we're currently working on (vastly) improved documentation, plus a few more usability improvements that I'm not ready to reveal just yet... 😁 Keep up the great work! 😎

Using an 8K monitor to play DOS games, that is the life.

WHAT! Phil using a CRT? What a time to be alive!!!! 😆

Excellent video mate, very well explained!

Let's face it. As older hardware get's more and more harder and expensive to find this is the way of the future. I have high hope for dosbox let's hope they get it right. Good video Phil.

This has become a really big thing with retro console scalers and emulation, so it's nice to see it coming to PC emulation as well. One thing that's really cool with the RetroTink5x and MiSTer is that they're now starting to allow HDR displays to be able to 'bloom' a bit like a CRT would. You're totally right that higher resolution displays will be able to get much closer to a CRT look!

I have a CRT with two 90s retro PCs that I love, but its' clear they're aging, and finding replacement gear is not so easy. DOSbox or something like it is the future, so I'm glad it's progressing! Thanks for the roundup!

Alley Cat in EGA with scan lines is what is in my memory. Thanks for that shot of nostalgia.

Very interesting comparison and good to know that support for variable refresh rate finally made it into a DOSBox fork. VRR is very applicable in emulation in general, imo! Thanks for the video!

I started getting into CRT filters within the last couple years and I much prefer them to the chunky pixel look that I used to like. I lot of modern retro games like Steel Assault for example have very good built in filters that I really like.

Highly informative review as always 👍 What a legend you are Phil👏

I still use vintage equipment but for a variety of reasons I may have to move to emulation in the future. Good to know how far emulation has gotten!

"I need an 8K monitor" "Sweet! What are you gonna play?" "DOS games."

Crazy to think we had to wait 30 years to finally be able to catch up with the quality of the original DOS!

I really enjoyed your retro video. Thanks for all the great info!

I didn't actually know that dosbox had been continued. As an old DOS gamer, those games still stir something deep in me. :)

VGA colors always have this sort of look, can't explain but they look so good. PC games of this area had a really seperate look from consoles.

This is fantastic. I've been using shaders on console emulators in RetroArch for awhile now and I can't go back. Can't wait to try the same tech on PC games now.

Been a while since I’ve been on RU-vid but I always drop in to get caught up on your videos :) thanks as always

Yeah, the large & sharp pixels suck for 320x200 games, glad to see you've joined us CRT-look fans :D

Phil, this is a great informative video (as usual). Didn't realize there was this "double scanning" going on on my VGAs back in the day, now I get it. And yes, I'm one of these guys that is waiting for 8 or even better 16k monitors to finally get REAL close to the CRT monitors. Once again, that was an awesome video. Can't wait for the next part about the sound cards (I'm a Soundblaster "collector" myself, still uses the SBLive resources to make music on a real Soundblaster). Now, going to install this new flavor of DOSBox, which I wasn't aware! See you soon, Phil. (I'm a long, longtime viewer but rarely comment).

The man himself! I wish I had found your channel sooner. Your website has saved my bacon more than a handful of times, it's a fantastic resource. Better late than never, I suppose!

I really like the CRT filters in Boxer on the Mac. But I saw that DOSBox Staging is available on Mac so I’ll be trying it this weekend. Great video!

I'm totally with you on this Phil. Been using (tweaked) shaders for quite some time now with Dosbox ECE on my 775 setup and love every minute of it... It's not just convenient but looks better than my actual retro machines with LCD (sharp pixels).

I use a display port to vga adapter to connect a 3090 to a CRT. Hits the mark for Amiga emulation and older GOG games.

Very good video on that topic. I've come to the same conclusion regarding those too-perfect pixels. I've preferred them to other options, but the games never looked exactly how i've remembered them. Also i love too see Gods (1991) getting some love ♥

Thanks for the heads up on DOSBox Staging.

Different phases of life had me keeping and pitching different hardware but pitching all of my CRTs before a move still holds a tinge of regret. I grew up around 14" and 17" VGA CRTs. I owned a matched set of Trinitron 19" CRTs for years, swearing off early LCDs as slow and pixelated. These days, I only have LCDs but I've been fortunate enough that most of the games I play on the 486 look okay to me on a 1080p LCD without any tweaks. My main focus for games is the sound, particularly MIDI and gameplay. Visually, I find myself missing the CRT look but not overly bothered by not having one. Naturally, this video shows what I've been missing so I guess I'll keep an eye/ear out for an old CRT. 😅

I didn't know that DOSBox is continue being developed and that is awesome. I need to check DOSBox Staging asap.

I had setup a DOSBox at 4k, and it was clear & sharp! Alot of Retro games are looking alot better than back in the day.!

Awesome! I get to see what Phil looks like! When I saw the thumbnail in the video, I was like who is that dude LOL.

Well explained and visualised. What I like to do sometimes is to use integer scaling (with the correct aspect ratio) to some high resolution and then use bilinear filtering. This gives pixels but with somewhat softer edges. One big advantage is that it almost fully eliminates shimmering in games with scrolling. Most shaders also achieve this.

I'd recommend having a look at the Dosbox Pure core for Retroarch. It supports 3DFX out the box (up to Voodoo 2 I think) and the default CPU is faster (at least according to synthetics) than a Pentium 200MHz with MMX. It's a great little Windows 9x machine but it does struggle with the later 98 games.

Well, you can use a CRT with dosbox, which is something that I have done on my retro Windows XP PC.

OMG thank you!! I didn't understand why most CRT shaders were adding these giant super obvious scanlines to the image when I never even remembered seeing any scanlines on my VGA monitor. the console people nearly gaslit me into thinking they must have been there and my brain just ignored them. I'm excited to try this shader, there's a lot of detail in these old game's graphics that is lost in the output of LCD monitors. The Indiana Jones comparison at 3:12 you made illustrates this perfectly: on regular LCD the chair looks like it has its pixels mangled giving a sensation that it's blurry, and the skull has some weird flat brown nonsense around it. on CRT it becomes evident that these are shading elements that give depth to the image: the chair looks clearer, sharper, you see it standing in front of the window light reflected off of the floors (in the LCD version you can hardly even tell that the floor is being unevenly lit by the windows), and the brown nonsense has disappeared from around the skull, instead making it look like it has more depth, that there's a part of it deeper in the bookcase that's more dimly lit. Artists in those days drew their art taking into account how CRTs would affect the final image, and the tricks they used to get more quality don't look right when output raw on a modern display

Biggest advantage of not using a CRT is definately that you are not damaging your eyes and less chance for headaches from the light radiation of these screens. I still remember vividly how I would really get headaches from spending longer amounts of time infront of them, while that was completely gone when I switched to an LCD more than 20 years ago.

Some people don't talk about this, but I don't remember noticing the scan lines when I was a child. Part of it is because it was partly masked by some bloom and bleed, which also gave it a sort of fake anti-aliasing, which is why we think the old games on the old crt tv's and monitors look better than they do on current hardware. I realize that scanlines were always there and noticeable to various degrees, but you didn't notice them. So once they start emulating that (as well as the color range, dosbox vs actual crt monitor, the contrast and tint is a bit different), I think it will look closer

I’ve not used DosBox for years, it’s clearly come a long way since then, might be time to have another go.

Nice to see you face Phil! I love your work btw.

Having still a 21" CRT with a Sony Tube, It's nice but heavyweight for the table.

It's kinda funny to think that the emulators need a higher res monitor in order to replicate the vintage low-res look.

Mame HLSL has some really great options for recreating scan lines, pincushion, phosphor glow, ghosting and focus errors on an lcd. It would be great if dosbox could implement some of those features. Some arcade games run at some strange refresh rates, so variable refresh, hi-res monitor for shaders and scaling also applies there.

Thanks Phil, Waiting for part 2

I felt the urge today to play the CD version of Monkey Island. And I remembered your video. The difference between standard graphics and VGA only/shader is amazing! Thank you, please keep us updated if you discover something even better!!

Woah... today I learned EGA monitors had single scan line per pixel. Seeing those screenshots of a true EGA display triggered nostalgia I had only experienced in screenshots in magazines and on the back of big box games. I grew up with a VGA monitor and only ever saw double scanline per pixel. Also Doxbox Game Launcher does what you asked for, comes with profiles ready to go for a huge amount of games.

There is a shader that other emulators use called sharp bilinear that integer scales above the resolution of the monitor then downsamples using bilinear which gets rid of the uneven pixels and shimmering in motion. You can get a similar effect with dynamic super resolution on nvidia running at higher than monitor res then downsample while integer scaling using nearest neightbor. That crt is weird because the game has a 2x2 pixel grid it should be 1x1 for pixel blending. Also nothing can beat the motion clarity of a crt. Modern displays have alot of motion blur with scrolling that requires black frame insertion to even compete with crts.

Happy Friday Phil!!!

Great information dude.

As always, fascinating for those of us with cga/ega/vga nostalgia.

Very interesting and educational video. I've always been in the "no shaders" camp, but this video may have changed my mind a little. I have a 4K Freesync monitor connected to a Radeon VII card that also does Freesync, but I've never tried Dosbox on that particular machine. I might try it. I skipped EGA completely. I actually didn't know that's where the thick scanlines people seem to think are desirable came from. (My bias is revealed by how I worded that.) I skipped from CGA to Tandy 16 Color and then VGA followed by SVGA etc. By the time I had the option of EGA, VGA was available so I went with that instead. IMO most VGA games look terrible on modern monitors. The blending of pixels and shadow map was essential for making it look like a somewhat realistic image. Generally when I play old adventure games nowadays I'll just play them in a small window. On a 28 inch monitor, you really don't need to play a VGA game fullscreen. Back in the old days most of us had 14 inch or smaller monitors anyway. Anyhow, great video and looking forward to the rest of the series.

Phil’s computer lab. Awesome as always. 👍

I use these shader and crt lines on my terminal windows at work...just for fun, and that nostalgic feeling. My co-workers always "rage" about how poor my monitor is. A super computer with retro looks.

I need to try this. I am also curious how well it runs on older systems. I do have compatibility issues on certain retro builds I have and one solution I have found useful without sacrificing the experience much, is using DOSBOX on a slightly older modern PC into one of my CRT monitors. The results are pretty nice and it has been a good middleground for dummies like me that can't get a wide array of games running correctly on actual period-correct hardware.

Imagine an 8K MicroLED TV with the scanlines shaders. It would look like a gigantic CRT with extra brightness and no dark scenes ghosting.

Very informative. Thank you.

My dude!! I also use D-Fend Reloaded!! Thanks for the video. I love your Indy game look!

Crazy, I have watched you for a couple years, and never having seen you, my mind gave you a mental image of someone who was about 19-24 of Hindi heritage and raised in New Zealand... Lol I was always overly impressed with your knowledge of early computers and operating systems, always thinking it great that someone born about y2k had such an appreciation for The Golden Age of Owning Computers. It is so nice to finally meet you Phil, and have all of my very incorrect (Human) pre-conceptions/assumptions destroyed by reality. Now I really want to know your backstory, where you were growing up, and what is your history with the hardware you show us?

You should do an overview of PCem and compare it to dosbox... 😁

Do you know if a original dx 100 486 (or similar) cpu blueprint that was used to produce them still exist and perhaps now is in the public domain so it can be made again without license and at modern size but original design?

Looking sharp Phil!

I have never been a fan of the sharp pixellated look that came with retro emulation on a crt. For years I always preferred the shader option over the sharper look. With MAME, HLSL was a godsend, with dosbox, reshade. It took a ton of tweaking but I eventually achieved a look I am happy with. For my dosbox setup on a 4k monitor, I use reshade with crt-royale plugin. Give it a try. It may take a while to set up but the results are worth it.

Also, you might want to explore creating a custom resolution on your monitor that can go up to 70Hz. By using custom "CVT reduced blank" timings, I'm able to go up to 70Hz on my Dell U2414H, but not with the standard timings (you might want to read up on that one a bit, but I can tell you it's "safe"; it either works or it doesn't 😎) Also note that 70Hz in low-res modes is a VGA only thing. If you're using proper EGA/CGA/Tandy emulation (e.g. `machine = ega`), then the screen refresh rate will become 60Hz just like on real pre-VGA hardware, and that can be handled by your monitor. I can confirm that smooth-scrolling is 100% smooth in games that support it, either at 60Hz (EGA/CGA/Tandy) or 70Hz (VGA). Although not too many games support smooth-scrolling on pre-VGA cards 😄 Another thing: when playing games hardcoded to 70Hz refresh rates, our default VFR frame presentation mode achieves much smoother output on a 60Hz host rates by dropping frames intelligently. Try Quake on Staging vs other DOSBox ports! PS: I'm glad you like the new website, it was my doing 😎

Always great to see another video of yours. Part of the appeal of "retro" computers for me is definitely getting them setup and working. Maybe I'm just an eccentric nerd. 😏 Cheers.

I'm confused. So I have a 980ti specifically because it is analog and will work with a CRT. With that set up and running DOSBox, that will work really well right?

Nice monitor. Mine is made by Philips and has the exact same on-screen-display menus as yours. Has been my daily driver on my main PC for over 10 years and still has a pristine image. And I've come to prefer the "thin" scanlines a CRT VGA produces over the thicker ones on an even older monitor.

CRT in thumbnail....instant upvote! 😂😎

This is something I definitely need to try out. I used to like the chunky pixels, too, but lately I’ve been wanting to see the games as the developers intended. Scan lines always bothered be as the implementation always darkened the image. But CRTs are dying, and as much as I would love to have one or more, in addition to finding one that would fit my needs with the Japanese computers I have, I really don’t have the space. I do have a 4k 120Hz VRR Monitor, so I can definitely take advantage of the correct refresh for VGA games. A while ago, I did the math to figure out how to have correct pixel aspect ratio for a given resolution on a 4x3 aspect picture. 8k is definitely going to help with that. Some of the resolutions don’t divide equally, but with more pixels, the closer we can get! Like you, I’m excited for the future. There is nothing that can compare to original hardware, with all the sounds and feeling, but we’re getting closer!

Very nice and informative! also part 2 about the audio is really well made! congrats! I have been having my random fix of retro gaming for several years now usig different tools, and playing with shaders to find the one you really like is not an easy thing but i like playing with these setting and make it looks like i really remembered. I am now currently try to build a small machine that can emulate mostly everything from Amiga days to the ps3, and i am struggling to decide if going for a crt monitor or a crt tv. I feel monitors are a little bit cheaper than some older tv, but wondering what is ideal in this case. I siding more for a tv, but i feel overall a monitor might give a better experience. Curious to hear some thought on this, and perhaps some comparisons the two of them with pros and cons :)

While I appreciate the amount of effort put into dosbox nothing beats real hardware in nostalgia

DOSBox is the inevitable future of DOS gaming. It will preserve DOS gaming for generations.

I have personally been waiting for variable refresh rate support for a long long time. Also the double scan tech confused me as a teen. I had a friend who had the same size monitor as I did. But when I saw my games and even text at the command prompt on his, it was so clean and sharp and mine had massive scan lines. I didn’t figure out why until many years later. But it drove me nuts trying to get my pc to play maniac mansion in glorious double scanned mode lol

Great! Awaiting 8k

I have a true MS DOS 6.3 machine and the newest SOS BOX is just as good and even in some aspects better. It runs well on all my Linux machines. I still use a SONY CRT 19 " monitor that triple scanned and I challenge any person to see the scan linea. :) It was designed for high-end graphic/video editing. It has 2 switchable VGA ports and can also produce box-in-box video to show both inputs. It still works great, what can I say, it is a SONY made in Japan. :) The darn monitor must weigh 1000 lbs. LOL.

GODS... damn man, all my childhood... a game for pure masochists... and the music... 30 years aferwards, it's still ingraved in my memory.

4:30 As I have understood it, a CRT monitor had similar width scanline every time. The width of the scanline depends only on focusing of the electron beam and if the CRT monitor is of high quality, say able to render pixel perfect 1280x1024 resolution, that requires having scanline that's only 1/1024 of the height of the screen. Now, when that same monitor is used to render e.g. 320x200 resolution, the width of the scanline is still 1/1024 of the height of the screen but you only draw 200 of those. Even with double scanlines, you go up to 400 at max which still results in total height of 400/1024 of the height of the whole screen. That's 60% still black! For optimal results, you would need to defocus the electron beam to match the actual resolution that's currently rendered on a CRT monitor. It's very rare that CRT monitors would do that and emulating the correct effect even with modern GPUs is hard. That said, I think that even 1080p should have more than enough pixels to correctly render the screen if software emulation of CRT rendering were high quality enough. Yes, the end result wouldn't look as sharp as modern displays but it would very accurately match the sharpness of the CRT monitors. Howerer, if you want to emulate the shadow mask, too, you would definitely need 8K display as you later explain. I personally think that shadow mask was a rendering artefact of CRT monitors only and it doesn't need to be recreated for optimal image quality. You would need to emulate the fact that edges of the scanline are not tack sharp but more like bokeh in photography instead.

Great video! What games were shown? And, where can they be purchased?

I am using real things nowadays, but some years back I used Launchbox as my main emulation launcher. It is really good for DosBox (I used ECE) and creating game specific configurations, CD image mounts etc. is a breeze. It also looks good and you can scrape box art, add manuals and so on.

Shader Scanlines always look wrongto me with higher resolutions they will propably get better but I think they lack that afterglow/blur and bloom/diffuse-dot of a real CRT. My LG Flatron T910B can run from 2048x1536, 1600x1200@75 native, down to 320x200 (but only at 160Hz otherwise it's signal out of bounds) which gives you beautiful fat scanlines. Also you can adjust the moire setting to max to get a bit blurrier image. Of course the apperture grille is much finer than an older monitors' but it's still a great alrounder for me.

Fantastic! Thank you!

Lol, for a sec I thought that your CRT had a crack at the start of the video, haha:D

It's obviously the sensible option, especially given how ridiculous prices are these days on retro hardware. It's great that it exists. Still, half the experience for me personally is the hardware itself and getting to use things I always wanted as a kid, but could never afford. I'm just glad that I have the retro hardware that I want now and don't need to engage with the Ebay scalpers. Well, everything except a Voodoo. Can't bring myself to pay the prices people want for them now.

I have never looked at shaders etc before. That screen from Indy really showed what I'm missing. The clear, sharp look is horrid (not something I thought I'd ever say), the CRT one is just so warm and full of vibes.

Hi Phil, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, I have a problem and you seem like the only way to find a solution... I bought a Yamaha MU-1000 module and I am trying to connect it to a computer running Windows 98/ME I download the driver that Yahaha claims should work (um122me9) but it does not recognize the hardware. I read somewhere that Yamaha keeps improving this driver, and perhaps this is the reason that it doesn't work on older systems anymore, and I am trying to find the original driver or something that will work. Do you know where it can be found???

hows the scanlines on a trinitron high end pc monitor tho?

Great video covering the differences and what to look out for. Nicely done as always. Haven't used DosBox in the last few years, myself. Moved over to PCem and 86Box. The ability to construct any system in the era with the click of a few buttons, is simply unmatched. I'll give up genuine CRT monitors, for the ability to have a 286, 386, 486, Pentium, and Pentium II of various clock speeds and configurations, a mouse apart from each other. I can't imagine having a bulky old system around to constitute just "one" of those configurations. The awfully inefficient power supplies, high voltage pitch in the CRT, etc. etc. Not bashing on purists, as I am also a purist when it comes to retro consoles, but, for PC? I ditched real hardware about 3 years ago, and will never return to it. Any concessions I need to make in the meantime, will be rectified as the emulation improves over time. As of right now, I haven't found a game that I like at least, that I can't run at least near-perfectly or better, through PCem or 86Box.

I don't know what it is what the CRT does different, but i have a feeling that the colors are much more vibrant. I'd rather connect a modern PC to a CRT and use DosBox there.

I'd be interested in hearing how DOSBOX handle COM ports/modems for the purpose of putting up a BBS. (I was a RemoteAccess SysOp back in the day)

This guy wants 8k to play DOS games. Amazing.

*DOSBOX actually is cheaper to keep than the original thing*

Thanks, Phil.!

What’s your thoughts on using dos box on a windows 10 machine desktop with a VGA crt using a dvi to vga adapter?

It blows my mind that 30 years later we still cant beat the old CRTs. We seem to have sacrifised too much for thinner & lighter screens.

I just play 1280x960 or 1280x800 in a window depending on the game resolution. Little bit iffier doing 800x600 or 1024x768 since I only have a 1080p display, but for older games directly scaling 2X into a window is perfectly legible and big enough to play comfortably, while keeping the pixels uniform. I have fiddled around with Pixel Perfect modes in DOSbox before with some bespoke forks, but I'm using the ECE version now because of it's nice S3 support. As for the CRT effect... well I'd rather have crispy LCD/LED pixels than some jank post processing effect that doesn't really look like either CRT or LCD...

Gone are the days of a XT mother board and setting the dip switches correctly to make sure it works with your graphics card and monitor.

Do you know of any good video tutorials regarding DOSbox Staging for someone who is already familiar with standard DOSbox?

Wish we could just have a display with adaptable resolution, no motion blur and good contrast and black levels. It's 2023 - Why is that so hard ?

Can't wait for the sound video; gotta give the edge to DOSBox one would think, given the now built in MT32 emulation and ease of using MIDI Soundfonts (or heck, a real MIDI device, emulated or otherwise). Also consider there are some easier to use DOSBox forks out there; DOSBox Pure especially (though it is a bit wonky when it comes to emulating CD drive paths) due to QoL upgrades like Save States (allowing me to "finally" beat Wing Commander after all these years).

What about the physical screen curvature of yer olde CRT on 8k? Shaders for that, too?

On the Shaders- I wonder if OLEDs are different somehow? Since kind of like a CRT, each pixel especially on a QD-OLED can basically be R, G, or B, and are truly off or on, and the subpixel layout of the new Samsung QD-OLEDs being triangular like a non-Trinitron CRT’s shadow mask? Do you think the physical structure there would be different?

Is that a softbox on your screen or just a regular sized australian spider? 😅